In contrast to Darwin's books on botanical and zoological issues, which contain numerous pictures, his Abstract published in 1859 (6th and final edition, 1872) contained only one rather "sterile" diagram, a phylogenetic scheme. The second and more important reason for the "stiffness" of Darwin's Origin of Species is attributable to the almost complete lack of illustrations. Ironically, Darwin's major, scheduled "Magnum opus" with the tentative title Natural Selection never appeared in print, but the Extract published by the author in November 1859 in order to establish priority with respect to his theory of the "preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations" became a best- and longseller. This judgement is in part due to the fact that the Origin of Species was not designed by Darwin as a separate book rather, it was published as an Abstract, taken from a much larger manuscript entitled Natural Selection. With respect to the most influential of Darwin's 16 scientific books, On the Origin of Species, the author remarked that "Sixteen thousand copies have now (1876) been sold in England and considering how stiff a book it is, this is a large sale". In his Autobiography, Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) presented a self-critical review of his achievements as a naturalist that revealed much about the character of this key figure of the evolutionary sciences and other branches of biology and geology. In this article I propose a tree-like "symbiogenesis, natural selection, and dynamic Earth (synade)-model" of macroevolution that is based on these novel facts and data. As a result, these geologic processes destroyed numerous populations of organisms, and produced the environmental conditions for new species of animals, plants and microbes to adapt and evolve.
At the same time, it created mountain ranges, deep oceans, novel freshwater habitats, and deserts. Over millions of years, plate tectonics and hence the "dynamic Earth" has caused destructive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The resulting theory of plate tectonics is now the principal organizing concept of geology. In 1929, Alfred Wegener published his theory of continental drift, which was later corroborated, modified and extended. According to the symbiogenesis-scenario, eukaryotic cells evolved on a static Earth from archaic prokaryotes via the fusion and subsequent cooperation of certain microbes.
In 1910, Constantin Mereschkowsky proposed an alternative, "anti-selectionist" concept of biological evolution, which became known as the symbiogenesis-theory. In this article I argue that Darwin was still influenced by "ladder thinking", a theological view that prevailed throughout the 19th century and is also part of Ernst Haeckel's famous Oak tree (of Life) of 1866, which is, like Darwin's scheme, static. This insight of 1859 was based on his now firmly corroborated proposals of common ancestry and natural selection. Charles Darwin is usually credited with the establishment of a branched evolutionary "Tree of Life". 1850 (Charles Bonnet, Jean Lamarck and others). Despite these insights, the Bible-based concept of the so-called "ladder of life" or Scala Naturae, i.e., the idea that all living beings can be viewed as representing various degrees of "perfection", with humans at the very top of this biological hierarchy, was popular among naturalists until ca. However, the evolution of phenotypic features is not predictable, and biologists no longer use terms such as "primitive" or "perfect organisms". 3500 million year long evolutionary history. All living beings on Earth, from bacteria to humans, are connected through descent from common ancestors and represent the summation of their corresponding, ca.
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